Hearing assistance devices, such as hearing aids, are used to assist patients suffering hearing loss by transmitting amplified sounds to ear canals. In one example, a hearing aid is worn in and/or around a patient's ear. Sharp transient noises are often perceived as annoying to patients with hearing aids, due to the amplification provided by the hearing aid. While amplification can restore audibility for many hearing-impaired patients it can also cause transients (sharp onsets) of sounds to be annoying to the point of painful. A solution to this problem would soften the perceptual annoyance of transient sounds while maintaining the audibility benefit provided by amplification. Previous solutions include onset detection and attenuation, which help to reduce the annoyance of sharp transients but they also reduce the audibility of perceptually important transients in speech. The previous solutions do not discriminate well between annoying, environmental transients and speech-related transients important for the perception of speech.
There is a need in the art for improved noise characterization and attenuation for hearing assistance devices.